One of the problems of the evacuation was that Maffu had sent a couple of his men to reconnoiter Kazima and they had not yet returned. It was decided that another compañero would go to find them and return as quickly as possible.
They should leave behind hidden the heavy weapons that they could not transport and move off with the rest; some compañeros such as Mbili and his group would have to complete a very long march if we wanted to abandon the lower base by dawn. Basing my reasoning on the nature of the enemy attacks, I calculated that they would give us a day’s respite before trying other maneuvers; this would allow us to leave quite easily, but we had to take steps to avoid contact and to save most of the gear.
Our three sick men, along with Ngenje, the man in charge of the base, left by boat for a little village called Mukungo where we were thinking of organizing resistance; they took with them some of the heavy weapons from Azi’s unit, but not all the weapons because the Congolese element in our own forces had also been affected by dissolution and a lot of stuff had been scattered around. The Congolese were now heading for the Fizi area. At first I planned to stop them but, on second thoughts, I ordered anyone who wanted to leave to be allowed to do so because, if it came to an evacuation, we would not be able to take everyone with us.
Before dawn we set fire to the house that had served as our accommodation for nearly seven months; there was a lot of paper, many documents we might have forgotten and left there, so it was best to destroy everything at once. Shortly, when it was already daylight, they began to burn the ammunition dumps without consultation; neither Massengo nor I had given any such order and, in fact, I had tried to persuade the Congolese that it was important to take the materiel with them, if not to the new base then at least to the nearby mountain. Instead, someone set fire to quite a lot of materiel. As the valuable store burned and exploded, I watched the fireworks from the first hill on the way to Jungo and waited for the many stragglers to catch up. They came along wearily, with an alarming lack of vitality, dropping parts of heavy weapons to lighten their load without a thought for what the weapon might mean in a battle. Virtually no Congolese remained in the units and the Cubans carried everything; I stressed the need to look after those weapons, which would be crucial if we had to endure a final attack, so the men set off dragging their feet and making frequent stops, bearing one cannon and one machine gun, having already left two others along the way.
I was waiting for the communications unit; we were supposed to attempt the first contact at 06:00 and I watched the head of the team, Tuma, coming down the hill opposite me from the Upper Base to the Lake Base. It was infuriating as the compañeros were taking three hours on a hill that should normally take 10 minutes to climb down, and then they had to take a break before continuing. I ordered them to leave anything superfluous and to try to walk faster; but among the superfluous things, the telegraph operator forgot the code and someone had to be sent back to retrieve it. I spoke harshly to the operators, trying to make them see their importance for communications and urging them to make an extra effort to reach the rendezvous point. We tried to make contact as usual at 10:00 and failed. We kept moving at the slow pace dictated by the three compañeros, who were completely unused to hiking through hills and marched only in spirit.
We made little progress; a normal march should take three or four hours from Kibamba (where our base was located) to Jungo. But at 3:00 in the afternoon, when we were scheduled to make our second contact with Kigoma, we were still quite a long way from the rendezvous point. At that time we managed to send the following message, which was successfully received:
Changa:
We have lost the base, we are proceeding with emergency equipment, reply urgently whether you can come tonight.
Then a second message:
Changa:
Today the enemy is not yet at the lakeshore, our position is Jungo, some 10 kilometers south of Kibamba. Massengo decided to abandon the struggle and the best thing for us is to leave as soon as possible.
When the compañeros present heard the “understood” from the lake, all their faces were transformed as if they had been touched by a magic wand.
Our final message was to ask whether Changa had arrived. The messages were coded and it was necessary to decode them and to encode the reply. The response seemed to be: “No one has arrived here.” Then they said they were having difficulties with the apparatus and went off the air.
The pre-coded message meant that the expected crew had not arrived, but it answered our question. Apparently Changa had had difficulties on the lake (enemy aircraft were flying over it that day) which would imply that the boats had been lost and we could not get away; the faces again clouded over with exhaustion and anxiety. At 7:00 [p.m.] we made another attempt at contact and failed; conditions at the lake meant that our little apparatus could only transmit properly at 3:00 in the afternoon.
We reached Jungo in time to sleep; everything was chaotic there, and not even food had been prepared. When we did a roll call, four men were missing: the lookout, who had been lost during the guardsmen’s advance; the two who had been reconnoitering at Kazima; and a fourth who had come in one of the groups from the Upper Base and inexplicably disappeared. A compañero had been sent to look for the men at Kazima, but he had returned without locating them. Desperate not to be left behind, he had only had a quick look around and came back. I guessed this by calculating the time he took but I said nothing to him because there was nothing to be done about it. We organized a unit under Rebokate’s command to take the road coming through the mountains from Nganja, so that we would have a commanding view of the two spots where the guardsmen might appear: the heights and the lakeside. As the men were heading off on this task, we heard an explosion at the top of the hill over which the road passed. As the ground was mined, we thought it was guardsmen advancing and that we would have no time to organize a defense on the heights. We occupied some hillsides, putting together a limited defense, and continued on toward Sele, a village quite close to Jungo.
The attempts to make contact at 06:00 and 10:00 on November 20 were also unsuccessful. The telegraph operator walked so slowly that we only reached Sele at midday, whereas that stretch should have been done in no more than an hour. Most of the men were gathered at Sele and we ate something to ease our hunger. Banhir, the man who had been left behind on the march, turned up at dusk. He had sprained his ankle and asked a compañero to let the others know so that they would go and find his backpack. While waiting, he stayed where he was but the other man didn’t do what he had been asked, or did it badly, and by morning he was still where he had suffered the accident completely alone. He was at the base until 9:00 in the morning on [November] 20 and then left, believing that he had lost contact with us. The guardsmen had not entered the base; all the roads were deserted and all the houses abandoned.
At 14:30 we made contact with Kigoma. Our message read:
Changa:
Total men to evacuate less than 200, it will be more difficult each day that passes. We are at Sele, 10 or 15 kilometers south of Kibamba.
I received the anticipated reply:
Tatu:
The crossing is set for tonight. Yesterday the commissioner did not let us cross.
The men were euphoric. I spoke with Massengo and suggested leaving from that very point at night. As there were a lot of Congolese, the General Staff held a meeting at which it was decided that Jean Paulis would remain in the Congo with his men and we and various leaders would evacuate; the troops who were originally from that area would remain. They would not be told of our intention to withdraw but would be sent on various pretexts to the nearby village. One of the little boats we still had to ply between various points on the lake arrived and took a large number of the Congolese, but those who were part of our force smelled a rat and wanted to stay. I ordered a selection to be made of those who had conducted themselves well up to that point, so that they would be taken across as Cubans. Massengo gave his autho
rization for it to be done as I saw fit.
For me the situation was decisive. Two men whom we had sent on a mission and had comprehensively and correctly fulfilled it would now be left behind unless they made their way back within a few hours.2 The full weight of the slander, both inside and outside the Congo, would fall on us as soon as we left. My troop was a mixed bunch, and my investigations suggested that I could extract up to 20 to follow me, this time with knitted brows. But then what? All the leaders were pulling out, the peasants were displaying ever greater hostility toward us. But I was deeply pained at the thought of simply departing as we had come, leaving behind defenseless peasants and men who were armed but defenseless, given their low capacity for fighting. To leave them defeated and feeling betrayed wounded me deeply.
To have remained in the Congo was not a sacrifice for me—not for a year, or even for the five years with which I had terrified my men. It was part of a concept of struggle that had fully taken shape in my brain. I could reasonably expect six or eight men to accompany me without furrowed brows. But the rest would view it as their duty, either toward me personally, or as a moral duty to the revolution; I would dispense with those who could not muster any enthusiasm to fight. Not long before, I had been able to sense this right here, when I interrupted a conversation and they turned to me, asking in a jocular vein about some of the Congolese leaders. I replied sharply that they should first ask themselves what our own attitude had been, whether we could say with hand on heart that it had been what it should have been; I didn’t believe so. An awkward, hostile silence descended.
In reality, the thought of staying in the Congo continued to haunt me throughout the night, and maybe I never did make a decision, but instead became one more fugitive.
The way in which the Congolese compañeros would view the evacuation seemed to me to be degrading; our withdrawal was a mere flight, and worse—we were complicit in the deception of those people being left behind on the ground. Moreover, who was I now? I had the feeling that, after my farewell letter to Fidel, the compañeros began to see me as a man from other climes, somewhat removed from Cuba’s specific problems, and I could not bring myself to demand of them the final sacrifice of staying. I spent the final hour like this, alone and perplexed, until the boats eventually arrived at 2:00 in the morning, with a Cuban crew that had arrived that afternoon and immediately had to cast off that very night. There were too many people for the boats at that late hour. I set 3:00 a.m. as the latest possible time for departure as it would be daylight at 5:30 when we would be in the middle of the lake. Work got under way on organizing the evacuation. The sick went aboard, then Massengo’s entire General Staff (some 40 men chosen by himself) and finally all the Cubans. It was a sad, inglorious spectacle; I had to refuse men who kept imploring us to take them too; there was not a hint of greatness in this retreat, no gesture of defiance. The machine guns were in position, and I kept the men on alert, as usual, in case there was an attempt to intimidate us by attacking from the land. But nothing like that happened. There was just a lot of grumbling, while the leader of those who were fleeing cursed in time with the beat of the loose moorings.
I would like to record here the names of the compañeros on whom I always felt I could rely, by virtue of their personal qualities, their belief in the revolution, and their determination to do their duty come what may. Some of them flagged at the last minute, but that final minute does not count because it was a weakening of their belief, not of their readiness to sacrifice themselves. There were certainly more compañeros in this category, but I was not close to them and so I cannot vouch for them. It is an incomplete, personal list, very much influenced by subjective factors, so may those who are not on it please forgive me and believe that they belong in the same category: Moja, Mbili, Pombo, Azi, Maffu, Tumaini, Ishirini, Tisa, Alau, Waziri, Agano, Hukumu, Ami, Amia, Singida, Arasili, Almari, Ananane, Angalia, Badala, Anara,3 Mustafa, the doctors Kumi, Fizi, Morogoro and Kusulu, and the ineffable “Admiral” Changa, lord and master of the lake. Siki and Tembo deserve a special mention. I often disagreed with them, sometimes violently, about our assessment of the situation, but they always offered me their guileless devotion. And a final word for Aly, a fine soldier and bad politician.4
We crossed the lake without any problems, despite the slowness of the boats, and reached Kigoma in daylight in the company of the cargo ship that was making the crossing from Albertville to this port.
A mooring rope seemed to have broken, and the exultation of the Cubans and the Congolese rose like boiling liquid overflowing the little container of the boats, affecting but not infecting me. During those last hours of our time in the Congo, I felt alone, in a way that I had never felt in Cuba nor in any of my wanderings around the globe. I might say: “Never have I felt myself so alone as I do today returning from all my travels.”
1. Che’s note: This officer had put the same arguments to his men at the time of the Katenga ambush.
2. Che’s note: They were rescued a month later by a group of volunteers consisting of Ishirini, Achali, Aja, Arasili and Adabu, under Siki’s command, and with the cooperation of Changa and the group of sailors who had arrived at the last minute. [Editor’s note: Another version of the list says the rescue group was composed of Siki, Ishirini, Abdallah, Achali, Alau and Wasiri. At the time when most of the force left, four combatants remained in the Congo: Awirino, Nyenyea, Chapua and Suleman. The last three were rescued by the group that remained in Kigoma; Awirino remained definitively disappeared.]
3. It has not been possible to identify the real name of this combatant. It may be a typographical error in the original.
4. Here troop Che offers a general evaluation of some of the combatants of the Congolese guerrilla force which, while recognizing its limitations, expands upon his comments and observations throughout the text, as the reader will already have discovered. At various points, Che also evaluates his own performance in his typically self-critical style. See especially, his epilogue to this text.
EPILOGUE
It only remains in an epilogue to draw some conclusions about the scenario of the war, how various factors played out and what I see as the future of the Congolese revolution.
I will focus, in particular, on the area that was the eastern front, the area with which I am personally familiar, and not generalize from my experience in a country with such diverse features as those of the Congo.
The geographical setting in which we found ourselves is characterized by the great depression filled by Lake Tanganyika, some 35,000 square kilometers with an average width of approximately 50 kilometers. It is the lake that separates Tanzania and Burundi from the territory of the Congo. There is a range of mountains on either side of the depression: one belonging to Tanzania-Burundi, the other to the Congo. The second of these, which has an average height of some 1,500 meters above sea level (the lake is at 700 meters), stretches from the environs of Albertville in the south, through the whole scene of the war to the region beyond Bukavu in the north, where it descends in hills into the tropical forest. The width of the system varies, but it is estimated to be an average of roughly 20 to 30 kilometers. There are also two higher mountain chains, steep and wooded, one to the east and the other to the west, with an undulating plain between them with valleys that are suitable for agriculture and for raising livestock. (The latter is mainly practiced by herdsmen from the Rwandan tribes, who have traditionally raised cattle.) To the west, the mountains fall sharply down to a plain some 700 meters above sea level, which forms part of the basin of the Congo River, a savannah with tropical trees, grasses and some natural pastures that break up the woodlands. The woods near the mountains are not particularly dense, but moving westward to the Kabambare region, they become thoroughly tropical and thick.
The mountains rise from the lake and give the terrain a very rugged aspect. There are little flat areas where invading troops can land and camp but these are very difficult to defend if the adjoining heights have not been secu
red. The roads to the south end at Kabimba, where we had one of our positions; the road to the west skirts the mountains on its way from Albertville to Lulimba-Fizi, and from there one branch continues to Bukavu via Mwenga, while the other passes along the shores of the lake to Baraka and, finally, Uvira. After Lulimba, the road climbs into the mountains; this is a good setting for ambushes, and so too—though to a lesser degree—is the part that crosses the plain of the Congo Basin.
From October to May rain is a frequent, daily occurrence and almost nonexistent from June to September, although there are some isolated showers toward the end of the latter month. It rains all the time in the mountains, but less often in the dry months. The plain abounds with game (a type of deer); in the mountains you can hunt buffalo (not very many), elephants and monkeys (which are very common). Monkey flesh is edible and has a fairly pleasant taste; elephant meat is tough and rubbery, but goes down easily enough when seasoned by hunger. The basic food crops are cassava and corn, while oil is extracted from palm trees. There are lots of goats, and the peasants have poultry, and there are pigs in a few places. With some difficulty, guerrillas without an operational base can feed themselves in the region.
There is a wider variety of crops to the north of Baraka-Fizi, and a sugar mill a little north of Uvira. Plenty of rice and peanuts are grown in the Kabambare-Kasengo area. There used to be cotton, but by the time we were there it had virtually disappeared; I don’t know how this crop would have been managed in an agricultural context, but it used to be exploited on a capitalist basis, with modern cotton gins installed by foreign corporations at strategic centers.